


Innovation

by Haberdasher



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-20 16:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3656649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mundane AU. How Cecil Palmer comes up with what we know as the Night Vale podcast, episode by episode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pilot

Late-night shifts, Cecil mused, were the worst of the lot.

It was three in the morning, and he had to fight to keep his eyelids from drooping, even after consuming more coffee than the human body was really meant to ingest, all so he could send out a show that probably nobody would even be listening to. His listening audience was on the small side at the best of times, and even his handful of close friends were unlikely to stay up that late on a weeknight just for him.

Carlos might have done it. Carlos, perfect Carlos, may well have chosen to listen to Cecil’s radio show in the wee hours of the morning, sacrificing the luxury of a steady sleep schedule in order to make sure that his boyfriend felt appreciated. But the radio signal of Night Vale’s humble community radio station was far too weak to reach Carlos’ current residence in Desert Bluffs, where he was working on something that he repeatedly assured Cecil was very prestigious and important and scientific.

So it was just him here, sitting in his tiny recording booth stringing words together and struggling to stay awake, his voice being broadcast across miles and miles only to fade away unheard after traveling through the starry skies.

Four o’clock now. He had just spent a full hour saying nothing of importance, doing nothing of importance, just going through the motions and reading monotonously off a script that could be called mediocre if you were feeling particularly generous (Cecil wasn’t, and he had a few more colorful descriptive terms in mind). The new intern really should have edited it better... ah well. Too late now. He had no choice but to read the bland, awkward thing, stilted wording and all...

Or did he?

Cecil’s voice trailed off as he considered another option, one that might be just outrageous enough to work.

Dead air time. Station management would ream him out for that... but the odds of even them listening in at this time of night were slim. If he left his booth now, if he walked right out of the studio and took a nap in the break room until the rest of town woke up, would anybody even notice? The world would still turn, the sun would still rise, presumably the none-too-generous paychecks would continue to roll in...

But that would be unprofessional of him.

Then again, so was his new idea about how to liven up the show, which was growing more and more attractive as he thought about it...

Cecil made his decision.

If he was stuck in this wretched booth all night, speaking to himself, well, he was going to have some fun with it, station management be damned.

Cecil cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and shoved his script aside, the pages fluttering to the ground and forming a disheveled heap.

He started speaking with no grand plan, no overarching outline for what he would do, but the words flowed out just the same, smoother than any he’d ever read off a script.

“A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious light pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep...”


	2. Glow Cloud

As far as Cecil could tell, nobody has noticed his... experiment from two weeks ago. He’d heard nothing about it, at any rate, and it seemed like the sort of thing that people would bring up if they’d been listening.

And, as luck would have it, he had been assigned another late-night/early-morning shift.

Well then.

What station management didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, right?

And this time, he even had a plan.

Calling it a “plan” might, admittedly, be overstating things a bit. His notes prepared for the second installment of... whatever this was were confined to a single page of slightly-crumpled notebook paper, and the majority of the space on it was taken up by a crude drawing of a cloud with a frowny face on it. The rest of the paper contained small, nearly illegible words tilted diagonally and upside-down and every which way besides the one that the paper’s lines recommended, consisting of such half-formed thoughts as “station cat!!!” and “dragon?”, most of which were underlined, circled, or both.

But it would do just fine.

Somehow, as the clock struck four and Cecil began the most exciting bit of his shift, he was able to string together a coherent, if... unusual, show from his hodgepodge of jumbled notes.

Until he reached the weather report. Or rather, if he kept up the format of the last time, the one instance in which he would actually play music on this part of his show.

He probably should have thought about that beforehand.

Cecil dug around in his precarious pile of CDs, hoping against hope that neither the dead air time nor the sound created by his frantic searching would be noticeable on air- because even if nobody was listening, even if he wasn’t supposed to be doing such a surreal, uninformative show in the first place, he still wanted to do it  _well_ \- before his eyes settled on something that might do the trick.

It was the latest set of tracks that a local group called Satellite High, whose band members had made small talk with him on several occasions, had sent him.

One which, for some reason that Cecil couldn’t quite divine, was centered around buses, though Night Vale had not had a bus system in decades.

It was probably their idea of a joke; he had yet to hear anything about them actually  _publishing_  this album, or even playing their songs at the handful of gigs that the band had managed to secure.

Perhaps he had finally found the perfect playtime for the songs on that album, a time when that CD would be used rather than just sit near the bottom of his (fairly impressive) collection of CDs and collect dust.

Cecil picked the first song whose title he spotted on the CD’s back cover and played it.

_Waiting for the bus in the rain, in the rain, waiting for the bus in the rain..._

He smiled as he took in the catchy music, already knowing deep down that it would be stuck in his head for the next few days (and that, if he started humming it or repeating its lyrics under his breath as he so often did, he would have some explaining to do), secure in the knowledge that serendipity had not steered him wrong.

It was  _perfect_.


	3. Station Management

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cecil has a less-than-pleasant discussion with his boss about his early morning broadcasts.

The good news was that apparently somebody was listening to Cecil’s late shows after all. The bad news was that the unknown listener had ratted him out to station management.

The resulting conversation, however, did not go quite as Cecil had anticipated.

As his new boss entered the room, lips pursed, eyes blazing, the radio host could already sense that he was in deep trouble.

He tried to make his tone of voice as casual as possible, as though he were preparing for a friendly chat rather than an inquisition. “What’s going on, Lizzie?”

“Liam.” came the stern reply. “Right now I’m Liam.”

Cecil massaged his forehead and let his hand block his view of his boss, though he knew Liam could still see him just fine, see the reddening color of his cheeks that now grew hot with embarrassment. He  _knew_  better than to assume like that. And now he had managed to well and truly muck things up before the conversation had even properly begun. Good going, Cecil. “My apologies. So, what brings you here, Liam?”

Liam put his hands on his hips. “What brings me here is that I just got in a complaint about your show- do you remember the early morning broadcast you did on the first of the month?”

Did he remember that broadcast? Every detail of it resurfaced in his mind in an instant, filling Cecil with a looming sense of dread. Oh yes, he knew what he’d said that morning, knew what he’d  _done_  for the second time over when he’d thought the rest of the town was fast asleep, all too well.

Cecil wondered if Liam could sense his fear.

“Ye-es?” Was that really his voice? It sounded too high-pitched to be his voice. If Liam hadn’t noticed how scared Cecil was before, well, he certainly would now. “And what exactly was the matter with it?”

Cecil tensed up as he awaited his boss’ reply, desperately trying to read the expression on his face, to figure out exactly how much trouble this little escapade had landed him in. Liam could be a professional poker player with how little he gave away.

(Maybe he was, or had been. Cecil didn’t know much about Liam’s personal life. Truth be told, he didn’t know much about a lot of things.)

“Your instructions were quite clear, Cecil. Quite clear. You were scheduled to run an ad for Big Rico’s Pizza, but I was informed that you instead advertised Coca-Cola- which, I remind you, has never given us so much as a cent in sponsorship funds.”

In the silence that followed, he added in a low murmur, “No matter how often I mail our fundraising letters to the Desert Bluffs office.”

It took Cecil a moment to fully process Liam’s statement, to realize that the criticism he had expected and the criticism he had actually received were worlds apart. Eloquent pleas for journalistic freedom and the value of entertainment for entertainment’s sake died on his lips.

“Okay, well, that- that was certainly a mistake on my part, and I am very sorry-”

“Sorry isn’t going to cut it this time, Cecil. Sorry isn’t going to get our funding back if Big Rico’s pulls its sponsorship because of you. Perhaps you need to be reminded that this isn’t your old college radio gig. This is a  _job_. And jobs? They come with consequences.”

“I know, I know, I won’t do it again-”

“You’d better not. Your contract is up soon, you know. Another mishap like this, and... well, renewal might not go as smoothly for you as in the past. Do you understand what I’m getting at, Cecil?”

 _Of course I do_ , he didn’t say.

 _Despite what you seem to think, I actually do have some idea of what I’m doing around here_ , he definitely didn’t say.

“I believe so,” he actually did say.

“Well, then, I’m glad we could reach an understanding about all this. You’ll be running another ad for Big Rico’s tonight in the same time slot, so hopefully you can make up for your previous...” He waved his hand in the air, as if the gesture could help him grab that perfect word that was just out of reach. “...misunderstanding.”

“Absolutely, just send me the ad copy as soon as you get it and I’ll make sure to get it on the air.”

“Well. It’s funny you mention the ad copy.” Liam wrinkled his nose as if he had just noticed a particularly noxious odor; Cecil sniffed, but could smell nothing besides the usual faint scent of paper and mildew. “Rico still hasn’t sent me anything about it. At all. He isn’t even answering his restaurant phone, which is absolutely not how a business should be run...”

“No ad copy, huh?”

Cecil had muttered his words under his breath, directing them more to himself than to his boss, but they were enough to disrupt Liam’s rant. “Not as of this moment, no. But if it comes down to it, I suppose you can always just ad-lib something. You’ve read out enough of these things before, right? I mean, you  _are_  a professional.”

“Yes, of course.” After a moment’s pause, Cecil added, “So did the listener that sent in the complaint have anything else to say about my broadcast?”

Another moment of pause before Cecil received his response, the voice quieter than he had expected.

“No, that was... that was about it, really.”

“Oh, good, glad to hear it.”

“But if there’s something else you feel you need to share with me, by all means, Cecil...”

“No, no, everything is just fine on my end.”

“I would hope so.” Liam turned around and began walking away, but just before he left the room, he gave one last statement. “I’m giving you a second chance here, Cecil. Don’t mess this up.”

And yet, as evening turned into morning, Cecil found that he had started the fantastical show that he had been looking forward to creating from the moment he woke up that day.

_I’m giving you a second chance._

And he spoke of his struggles with station management, though what he was describing was less the person with which he’d exchanged a none-too-amicable conversation and more... some sort of inhuman beast.

(Though Cecil knew little of his boss’ personal life, he was fairly certain that they were at least human, much as he enjoyed private speculation to the contrary.)

_I mean, you are a professional._

He ran an ad for Big Rico’s Pizza right on schedule, even though that ad copy never had made its way over. It was a good enough ad. He called the pizza scrumptious, talked it up as the best pizza joint in Night Vale...

And he might have suggested that the restaurant’s clientele included a group of mysterious hooded figures along the way. And said that eating there regularly was required by law.

But what’s a little embellishment, really?

_Your instructions were quite clear, Cecil._

He wondered who had been following his show at this ungodly hour, who had felt strongly enough about an advertisement sent out at four in the morning that they had to tell station management of his mistake.

He wondered if that mysterious listener was listening to him again.

He wondered if they were hearing what they wanted to hear.

_Don’t mess this up._


End file.
